Randy Brown embedded with his former Iowa Army National Guard unit as a civilian journalist in Afghanistan, May-June 2011. He authored the poetry collection Welcome to FOB Haiku: War Poems from Inside the Wire (Middle West Press, 2015). His work has appeared widely in literary print and on-line publications. As ‘Charlie Sherpa,’ he blogs about military culture at: www.redbullrising.com.

Jeremy Warneke is a public servant in the Bronx, New York. He enlisted in the Army National Guard prior to 9/11. In 2016, with the support of the Bronx Council on the Arts, the New York Public Library, Voices From War…and his family, he created his own writing workshop, “The Craft of War Writing,” which provides free, high-level reading and writing instruction for veterans, as well as the general public, based upon the themes of conflict and war.

Eric “Shmo” Chandler is a husband and father who cross-country skis as fast as he can in Duluth, Minnesota. He flew 145 combat sorties in the F-16 during seven trips downrange. His work has appeared in Sleet Magazine, The Talking Stick, O-Dark-Thirty, Aqueous Magazine, Great Lakes Review, Grey Sparrow Journal, and Northern Wilds, to name a few. Visit ericchandler.wordpress.com to read his published fiction, non-fiction, books, and poetry.

“What’s in this thing?” I shouted over the wop-wop of the Sea Knight’s rotors. One hand on the stick, I held up the leather document case, glanced at its tearaway label. “Confidential.” I shook it. In the black windscreen, the tower rose out of the darkness like a lighthouse.

“Dunno,” Pete said. “NATO junk. None of our business. Let’s just get this done and get back to the ship.”

Looming 15 miles behind the desert island, the silver silhouette of the Arabian coast drew a line between the turquoise bathwater below us and the sea of sand ahead. I aimed our nose for the base of Masirah tower and dropped to a hover for one last run.

As the rotor brake stopped the wop of the blades, Pete unstrapped and turned back to Russell, who’d been staring at his unfamiliar .45.

He nodded, looking past my shoulder into the dark. “That’s the Eisenhower out there, isn’t it?”

We hadn’t seen the Ike in days, even though we were part of her battle group.

“Yes, yes,” he said, tapping his finger on his mike. “It’s the Ike all right. I have them on Channel Five. They’re 160 miles out. Lots of planes have launched. Listen.”

Pete walked to the radio, the blinking status indicators. Behind us was a neatly made bed.

“Do you live here?” I asked.

“Yes, of course. I’ll get some tea.”

“You can desert the tower?”

“Yes! We’re closed now! Look, I can turn out the runway lights!” He flipped a switch and the sky went blind.

“Magic,” I said. “Just turn them back on when we leave.”

He signed the receipt, then disappeared into the hall, pulling tomorrow out of the pouch.

Pete pulled up a squeaky metal swivel chair and put his feet up. The radio emitted drawls in the background.

“And Marshal, 501.”

“501, Marshal.”

“Make a recommendation to bring 502 down first, ah, because he’ll be (garbled).”

“501, say again.”

“Roger, this is 501, I would like 502 to come down first. Ah, once he’s dirtied up, he’s committed to a dirty Bingo.”

“01, stand by.”

“Hear that?” Pete was listening intently to the jets now, while I looked at the genie’s personal effects. “That’s his strike leader, trying to help him. They’re going to bring him down first because he has a hydraulic failure. Young guy in an A-7, Moonraker 502. He’s low on fuel, 200 miles out. Once he drops his hook, gear, and flaps, he’ll be ‘dirty,’ too, all that junk fixed in place below his jet like it was welded there. His fuel radius will be cut in half. They’ll have to bring him right in.”

“Mmm.”

“501, unable, ah, 502 is last, sir.”

“Roger that.”

“Wow,” Pete cooed in a low voice.

“What’s up?” Arthur stuck his red and silver head into the room.

“A human sacrifice,” I said, imagining myself behind the night dials.

Pete spoke with morbid excitement. “He’s got a known hydraulic failure. I’ve just realized–CATCC is figuring there’s a chance his hydraulics could fail on touchdown. His crash will wipe out the whole carrier deck for 20 minutes. Timing’s too tight, with too many planes low on fuel. So they’ve got to land him last.”

“Couldn’t they just push his aircraft over the side?”

“Even that would take time. It’s a war-at-sea strike. There are probably 70 planes in the air.”

“501, ah, Marshal, how far out did you wish to dirty up?”

“I’d like about 15, please.”

“And make that 20 if possible, Marshal, for 502.”

“502, roger.”

“Marshal, 502, could you get a squadron rep in CATCC, please?”

“502, say again.”

“A squadron rep in CATCC.”

“502, roger, stand by.”

“What’s your state, 502?”

“4.8.”

“Say again.”

“4.8, and I compute my dirty Bingo to be 4.1.”

There was a pause. “Bingo divert 119 nautical miles.”

I felt a chill. Bingo–the mystical point of no return, determined by fuel. A dirty Bingo cut that distance in half. With only seven hundred pounds of gas to spare, this kid was probably screwed to the moon.

“Thirsty?” Arthur walked behind a cloud of steam. Three cups and saucers were parked around a central English china pot adorned with a painting of an old farmhouse with a thatched roof. The place had a rugged door, a shepherd, and some pink and lint-colored sheep. I turned around.

“You went to King’s College?” I said, looking at an old graduation picture.

“Long time ago.”

“How long you been here?”

“A million years.”

“You’re a sort of lighthouse keeper here, aren’t you?”

“There’s more to this post than watching a Fresnel lens wheel round. I run the entire air base here.”

“Don’t you get lonely?” I pointed to a smoky picture of a blonde shaded by a weeping willow. “Who’s that?”

He waved his hand, served me, then Pete.

Pete flicked off the carrier noises and spun his metal chair in our direction. “Our crewman’s out there with our aircraft,” Pete said. “We’ll have to go soon.”

“Did that lad land all right?”

“Last I heard he was told his Bingo divert was 119 miles out if he couldn’t get on deck.”

“Do you think he will make it to the carrier?”

Pete didn’t say anything.

“There’s a chance they’ll send him here!” Arthur said. “I had better make some more tea.”

By the time he returned, I’d divined Arthur was not precisely British but the type of Canadian who ached to be British. Was that his crime? Was that why he was here? I looked involuntarily at the picture of the waved-off woman again.

“502 is three, well below glide path and on course.”

“See? Your friend’s coming in now,” said Arthur. “Everyone’s aware of his fuel state. They’ll trap him right smart, using their arresting nets as a backup.”

“And it’s a trap on the long runway. If you miss the trap, you’ll probably have about 1,200 pounds of gravy when you get there.”

“Roger.”

“Come to me,” Arthur said.

“Still no joy?” we asked.

Arthur shook his head. “But it doesn’t matter. Our navaids are up. Help me with these lights.” He motioned to two large switches, each of which weighed as much as a flaming birch sidechair. I vomped them both to the on position and saw the blue taxiways remember their color slowly, then leap to full brightness. We waited.

“Why isn’t is he talking to us?”

“I don’t know.”

“But it’s been ten minutes. Why isn’t he in touch with the carrier?”

Arthur jumped up, pointed down. “I don’t know. There he is!”

“He’s 70 miles out.” We saw the light, a single cell stirred up on Arthur’s black radar wok, rocketing toward us.

“502.”

“He’s losing it,” said Pete. “He’s just saying his call sign.”

“502, rep, say your state.”

“Angels 19.5, 1.8.”

A paralyzing silence. Then the rep’s voice. “502, you don’t have enough gas to get to your divert airfield.” The words froze down the length of my spine.

We could not hear 502 transmit in reply.

“Help him!” shouted Arthur, and he started flashing the lights of the entire base off and on, on and off, vomp, vomp, a giant, three-mile signal. We pumped the runway lights off and on like well water while I said, “Where’d all his gas go? I thought he had 1,200 extra pounds.”

“It’s his fault,” said Pete. “He could have used his TACAN for a time and distance check against groundspeed. He could have called up the field on Data 89. They’ve got everything in those things now. He’s got a heads up display in there, you know.”

“Yeah, Pete, it’s all his fault.”

“He’s going to make it!” Arthur jumped between us.

The Corsair was coming in over the waves, burning too much gas even while losing altitude. Dirty. He called field in sight in the blind. Arthur activated the arresting gear and transmitted landing instructions.

“He’s two miles from the numbers, approaching at 125 knots!”

Relieved, our host broke into a smile. The Corsair turned to a modified base leg for a landing on Runway 22, flying in a mineshaft but flying smooth, and descended to 700 feet. Then it made a funny hesitation, reduced airspeed, and turned parallel to the beach.

“Oh no, no, no!” Arthur was interrupted by the pilot’s mayday call. A couple of chugs later, he punched out. We saw the flash of his rocket-assisted easy chair directly over the waves and watched in disbelief as the Corsair sparkled into the shoreline like a discarded cigarette lighter.

“Bugs at a lightbulb.” Arthur did a little dance. With sweetness the chute opened–with lazy, full, Louisiana pregnant sweetness. “I’m just a lighthouse, with all these ships hitting the ledge.”

The pilot was awash in light now, the slow vowels of moonlight, runway lights, the open reflected night brilliance of the waves. We watched his feet, his legs, his black silhouette descend in the surf while screaming silly efficiencies at each other: “Shouldn’t we launch?” and “No, they’re sending the H-3s.” “Move.” “Now.” “Look!”

Like that. Hornet talk. Even Einstein is inarticulate when a hornet is stinging him.

The chute collapsed into the nightmare surf. Light was cheap, everywhere. Arthur had thrown all Canada into the sky so that when we saw a black figure walking out of the blinding surf dragging a helmet in the water, he was backlit like some jerk blocking a drive-in movie picture on his way to the snack bar.

Shapes of humans–criminals–rushed to the waves before stepping respectfully to each side of him, forming a stony line as he approached, sideboys in a bizarre ceremony. Then the two H-3s appeared, giant angels with their landing lights on. Their rotorwash blew down on the pilot’s wet parachute, beat it down in the night.

“They’re taking him?” I asked. “Can’t we do anything? He’s trying to walk to us.”

Arthur and Pete weren’t talkative.

“Seriously?”

I ran for the door, bolted down the stairs, and blasted across the dizzy-hot tarmac toward the crashing waves. I ran closer toward the figure but then stopped twenty feet away. He’d taken off his helmet and as he focused on me I realized he looked exactly like me, from his sweep of dark hair to the malignant beginnings of a beard. I was suddenly so thirsty. The back of my throat became a desert. Suddenly that tea seemed like a good idea. I rubbed my eyes and tried to focus on the darkness ahead as I watched myself being led off for the debrief. In a typhoon of light and sound the helicopters swept him away and disappeared into the sky.

***

Colin W. Sargent is a former Ch-46D pilot and graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy. He edited Approach, the Navy flying magazine, before he started Portland Monthly in his home town in 1986. He is a Maine Individual Artist Fellow in poetry, has an MFA from Stonecoast, and earned his PhD in creative writing from Lancaster University. The Boston Castrato, his second novel, was published in the UK in 2016 and was released this fall in the U.S. He lives with his wife, a former Naval Officer, in Virginia, Maine, and, when possible, the rest of the world. www.colinwsargent.com.

Hopped up on ‘number tens’—a cocktail of Quaaludes and speed—Willie Kearns, one of our black sergeants, stormed into the mess hall and murdered three white soldiers. Then Kearns slumped to his knees, braced his rifle’s stock on the floor, and pressed the warm muzzle into the flesh under his chin.

That was how I always pictured it anyway, so that’s what I told the boys. I turned down the radio in my garage gym and described to the three teenagers how the gunfire pierced the peaceful hum of the rear camp in An Khe.

Crack-Crack-Crack. Pause. Then one more.

The do-ragged heads bowed ‘round my footlocker waiting on the kitty in a game of bid whist popped to alert. I dropped my cards and rushed to the row of Quonset huts along with everyone else. The three troops Kearns spared—two brothers and an esé—tottered into a clutch with the rest of us, watching the medics cart out three blood soaked heaps of jungle fatigues on stretchers. Kearns they brought out last—doped to the eyeballs, endotracheal tube taped like a flagpole to the sloppy mass that had been his face, body still quaking in the Dexatrine funky-chicken. What is it about certain sons of bitches that makes them so damn hard to kill?

“That’s it?” Simon asked.

I’d left out the part about sons of bitches, but studying Simon’s restless, oil-slick dark face, I understood that including that tidbit wouldn’t have made any difference no how. I still wouldn’t have lived the sorta mythical war that boy wanted to hear about.

I jerked a thumb at the two forty five pound plates on my side of the barbell. “You good with this?”

Simon had been my eldest son Michael’s best friend for something like five years by then and a near permanent fixture at my house all that time. That boy shoulda known he wasn’t getting some foxhole brotherhood bullshit outta me.

It was a bright Sunday morning and the garage door was half-masted to the autumn breeze. I took a deep breath and turned from Simon’s hungry stare to my own sons, Michael and Gabriel.

“I ever tell you guys I had to get circumcised after I was drafted?”

“How old were you?” Gabriel asked. My youngest, the writer. That was the fall of ’96. Gabriel must have been about twelve then.

I scissored my fingers at Gabe. “Just turned eighteen.”

That set the three of them to squirming in they sneakers, hands inching towards nether regions.

“So, circumcision was a condition of your conscription to fight a war for a government that treated you like a second-class citizen?” Michael asked, without pausing for breath.

I chuckled. “Exactly.” Over the years I’d referred to getting drafted as a lot of things—mostly as a motherfucker—but never as ‘conscription.’

“The unkindest cut of all,” Michael said, shaking his head.

“Julius Caesar.” Simon flashed them pearls at Michael. I remember every time I saw that boy smile. He was stingy with them grins, like each one cost him fifty bucks and he was on a limited income.

Simon slid under the weight, settling his shoulders onto the bench’s leather cushion. He clasped and unclasped his fingers on the perforated steel, then pulled himself eye to barbell and lowered himself back to the bench. Once. Twice. After the third go he popped the weight off the rack with his funky “oohyuhken” grunt—from that Street Fighter video game them boys loved so much. Simon lowered the bar to his chest then fought it back up. Steady, machine-like for a solid set of eight. Two more than I’d got. I guess that Vietnam hair the boy had had up his ass all morning was good for something.

“Oh, I see you angling for a title shot, huh, young buck?” I said, twisting my trunk in an exaggerated torso stretch.

That set the boys to laughing.

As a deputy warden over at Antoine State Prison I hadn’t done a forced cell movement in more than a decade, but I still pushed heavy weights. At sixteen, Simon—a gymnast lean, three-sport jock—was already matching me plate for plate. My own sons had been blessed with my caramel complexion and (as much as I hate to say it myself) good looks, but not my stocky frame. Or as Gabe put it, “Mom named us for angels, Dad, not dwarves.” Pair of jokers, Gabriel and Michael, the both of them. Still, them two brainiacs preferred my Sunday morning garage gospels of mass, discipline, and force to the kind they’d a been listening to down at New Hope Baptist with their mother right then.

Michael turned up a Tupac song that sounded to me like an X-rated Saturday morning cartoon jingle. Tupac. That boy with all them frivolous tattoos. Ink was like an affair; something a man should have only if it meant something.

“This guy getting shot is a big deal, huh?” I said.

“Do you remember when Marvin Gaye died, Dad?” Michael asked.

“Vaguely.” One of them lies I used to tell outta that general spirit of keeping at least part of my mask up.

“Well, I remember it. You were washing the car. Mom came running outside with the news. You said, ‘Jesus.’ Then you sat on the curb.”

“How old were you then?” I asked.

Michael blinked twice. “Five. But I remember. You sat there awhile.”

I grunted, restrained my smile. What would I have done with my life if I’d had half them boys’ brains?

I watched Sy bounce from the bench to his feet. He leaned over, touched his toes—chest pressed to thighs—and held.

I sure as shit wouldn’t have joined the army. That’s for damn sure.

***

At Antoine State Prison the next Saturday, Ettie Moten—our head counselor and Simon’s mother—sat on the opposite end of my tan steel desk watching me thumb through her ‘Prison Rape Elimination Plan.’

“You know what the COs are saying about this PREP stuff?” I asked, not looking up.

I hadn’t cracked that PREP folder all week and she definitely could tell.

“Did you speak to Simon?” Ettie asked.

Something else I hadn’t done.

“Yeah.” I paused. “Kind of.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means I think the boy has his mind made up regardless of what I tell him.”

“Did he tell you,” Ettie asked in that cadence black women reserved for speaking to trifling motherfuckers, “that his father died a couple days ago?”

I’d seen Sy at my house half a dozen times since our last weight lifting session together and he hadn’t said a thing. Jesus. Sixteen years old and carried his self like Jim Brown in the fourth quarter.

“I never talked to Simon about his father. Didn’t wanna give the impression I was trying to take his place.”

Ettie waited for me to meet her eyes. “News flash, Frank. You filled that void a long time ago.”

“You said Simon never met him.” I pinched the bridge of nose. “Troy, right?”

“Never. But we’ll be going down to New Orleans for the funeral. Simon will meet some of his father’s…” Ettie scanned the off-white stucco wall behind me before deciding on, “colleagues.”

After all these years my wife had never fully warmed to Ettie. Claire the red-boned, processed-hair, ‘we shall overcome’ church girl and Ettie the headwrap wearing, Angela Davis spouting ideologue who wasn’t passing anybody’s paper-bag test. Claire accepted Ettie like she did my night shifts—something you tolerated for decent health insurance. And Ettie knew it. But Simon—brick faced as he was to the world—never failed to make Claire laugh, probably more than she wanted to. And Ettie knew that too.

“Claire and I agreed that you need to talk to Simon before we head down to New Orleans. He’s on the cusp, Frank. Him and Michael. They’ll be seventeen in a couple weeks. Old enough for the military’s delayed entry program. The decisions those two make this year are bigees.”

“I don’t know what to tell that boy about the military. Even when I first got back, I never talked about Vietnam much. You know that. Gives people less of a chance of pissing me off.”

That excuse sounded even more pathetic than the shit about not wanting to replace Simon’s father. Everybody knew someone who’d fought in Vietnam and didn’t want to talk about it. Still, I figure it’s better than being one of those guys who never shut up about it, the ones who saw themselves as the true victims of the war. Everybody knew one of them guys too.

“Tell him the truth,” Ettie said.

The prison’s public announcement system screeched to life, startling both of us. “Code red, Wing Two! Code Red, Wing Two!”

Ettie smoothed her pants against her thighs with her palms. “Should I wait in my office?”

Ettie and I had worked at Antoine together for more than twenty years. Long enough for her to know that, whether this was an assault on a correctional officer, a fight between inmates, or a medical emergency, her role was, for now, to get outta the way.

I stood up behind my desk. “Give me an hour or so to sort this out.” I tapped a finger on the PREP folder. “I know this is important. We’ll discuss it, ok?”

Ettie gaze dropped to her watch. I glanced at the wall-mounted clock behind her. 18:30 already.

“Let’s do it Monday. Don’t make me have to track your sorry butt down again, Frank.” Ettie stood, placing a hand on her hip. “Good to go?”

“Ok.” I smirked at her CO jargon. “And I’ll talk to Simon. Really talk to him.”

I hauled ass for leather down the stairs of the staff wing, across the reception area, and up to the thick glass of the control room. Measmer, a gangly, blonde former coastguardsman fresh out of the academy, leaned into the VHF radio base station, pen poised over a blank notepad.

I drummed my fingers on the glass, caught the youngster’s eyes, and pointed to the door.

We exchanged a look. Measmer got it. A good kid—one of the best to come out of that class.

“None of them have gotten on the horn yet to confirm what’s going on. Nothing on the CCTV either.” Measmer gestured to the row of TV screens flickering between black and white views of empty stairways, hallways, and rec rooms.

My chloroform shoes echoed in the deserted hallway, their glossy shine reflecting the dull glow of the wall mounted emergency lights—that dim 24-hour reminder of the reality of incarceration. I bounded up the ladder well to Wing Two and punched the buzzer, mind tight with that rush I learned to both sorta love and sorta hate during the war.

Nestor struggled opened the steel door and began speaking before I could even step in, his tone that of a schoolboy tattling to the teacher.

“Riggs threatened me from his cell. He’s got a shank. Now he’s demanding to talk to you.” Nestor waited a good five seconds before adding, “Warden.”

I gave him a look that could have reshaped iron. “Let me in, Nestor.”

Two standing fans oscillated hot air and the smell of disinfectant around the taut, windowless space. Eights COs suited in react gear—body armor, batons, and shields—stood in the tiny area just before the cellblock, artificial light glinting on lowered visors. Nestor cocked his head at me in anticipation of my orders.

If a cartoonist was to sketch up a prison guard—exploiting every lame-ass stereotype us COs despised—he would turn out someone exactly like Nestor. The latest accusation of misconduct against the bastard involved instigation of a fight between two inmates.

“Did you see those fucking apes going at it?” Nestor joked in the break-room afterwards.

Nestor never talked about the event that prompted his transfer from McAlster prison a few years ago. But I heard young COs whisper to one another, “That’s him. That’s Colin Nestor. Dude broke a con’s jaw in Big Mac.” You could tell Nestor loved that the story had grown legs.

The seasoned COs almost universally disliked Nestor, but they would back him against a con. The same groupthink compelled soldiers to cover for each other in Vietnam, for everything from curfew violations to rape. But institutional loyalty alone didn’t explain the concentrated aggression in the dense space. Behind their face shields the COs’ eyes pleaded for a ‘go’ order. They wanted to storm a cell and stomp a con. I know the feeling, but have a hard time explaining it, harder still justifying it. Shit. Maybe we were all more like Nestor than I wanted to admit.

“I saw the weapon,” Nestor said, more to the other COs than to me. “Reason enough for a forced cell move to Special Quarters.” Long pause. “Warden.”

I started down the row of cells, a spider of cold sweat crawling down my back. The cellblock reeked of that pitched battle between human excrement and industrial strength bleach. As a Deputy Warden, I didn’t walk the rows much anymore. That cellblock stench I had grown so used to while earning my stripes immediately sets my heart to thudding in my chest nowadays.

“Appreciate you coming up, Warden,” Riggs said. “I know your boys are dying to have a go at me.”

I kneeled, picked up the shank. A toothbrush handle reinforced with electrical tape, sharpened on the end, and spliced with a disposable razor. I turned the nasty little piece of work over in my hands, admiring it. Prison and combat encouraged ingenuity.

I moved to the front of the cell. “What’s going on, Riggs?”

“That bitch-ass Nestor talking about how the last governor granted less than three percent of paroles for lifers.” Riggs leaned his forehead against the bars. “Like I don’t already fucking know that.”

As a black, non-snitching, former gangbanger convicted of murder, Riggs occupied the top of the Antoine prisoner hierarchy—a delicate equilibrium of connection, conviction, sexual preference, and race (not necessarily in that order).

I’d known Riggs since I was a rookie CO. Back when I was still patrolling the yard during rec time, watching sparrows catch a buzz on the electric fence, knowing full well I was within swinging distance of every concealed shank on that patch of grass and concrete—the only part of Antoine that the sun touched. Hell, the better part of both our lives had been more about prison than anything else.

“You pulled the shank to get Nestor to shut up.”

“Yeah,” Riggs replied.

“You got anything else in there we need to know about?”

“Nah.”

“Relax. No one’s going to pursue this. Get some sleep, Riggs. We’ll have the governor’s decision in the morning.”

Riggs nodded, opened his mouth as if to thank me, but didn’t. Then he shut his eyes and nodded again.

The governor’s denial of Riggs’s parole came through bright and early, just after first count.

I stayed on a couple hours after shift to escort Riggs back to gen pop myself. That and to have a couple choice words with Nestor. That little bastard needed to fully understand that if he tried to write up Riggs he’d be doing so without any support from me.

By the time I left the facility late that morning all I wanted was to shit, shower, shave, and sleep.

Back at the house, after ticking the first two ‘to do’ items off my list, I wiped the steam from my bathroom mirror in preparation to enjoy number three. I squeezed a dime-sized portion of shaving cream onto my boar’s hair brush then splayed the lather across my face, savoring that worn leather aroma and the sounds of my wife fussing over church clothes in our adjacent bedroom. I reached over my head with my left hand, pulled the cheek tight, and ran the straight razor down my face in short, smooth strokes. A proper shave. Ain’t nothing quite like it.

If memory serves, it was later that same year that I demonstrated the process to all three of the boys. When I flicked out my straight edge Simon looked me dead in the eyes, serious as a heart attack, and said, “That is pretty freaking bad ass, Mr. Frank.” Setting the four of us to giggling like schoolgirls.

I got my first proper shave at Am Tinh’s, the spade whorehouses outside the base camp in An Khe. In ’71 the G.I. version of tolerance didn’t extend to getting laid. Shit. Probably still don’t. In the rear, the white boys hocus-pocused some of the Vietnamese whores into Sally-Annes and viciously protected they investment. Meanwhile the fiercest black cats made sure that even the down white boys knew better than to set foot in Am Tinh’s.

“Trust me, young blood,” my best friend Dawk told me, running the saw edge of his Swiss Army Knife through his moustache. “Joint’s got the best juke box in ‘Nam.”

I chose Qui, a ‘mamma-san’ in her, maybe, late twenties, which put her a decade ahead of me. I convinced myself this was some kind of enlightened decision. But truth told it was because them teenage whores—faces cemented by nights of hard liquor and closed fists—terrified me. Don’t get me twisted, Qui frightened me in the same way, but she was older and somehow that made the whole arrangement seem okay. It wasn’t until I got back stateside that I realized just how unrecognizable my wartime caveats had rendered my morals.

Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit how much I loved them nights at Am Tinh’s. The baths that never quite washed off the exhaustion and fear, the saffron tinged breeze flapping them floor length vanilla curtains, the deep purple dusks through the glassless windows, staring into Qui’s narrow dry eyes before drifting off to sleep.

Michael and Gabriel exchanged shrugs then settled back onto the couch.

I took a breath.

“Most of the fighting I was involved in took place in Cambodia. That probably doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot to you guys now. But it meant we fought more NVA than Viet Cong. North Vietnamese Regulars. Professionals. Real soldiers, like us.”

“The heavy contact went down ten or fifteen miles over the border. I can count those times on one hand. I was shitting myself with fear every time. I spent that entire year terrified and exhausted. Hell, sometimes the only reason I didn’t bolt was because I was just too ass-whipped tired.” I paused, looked at Simon. “You’d handle it better.” I waved off Simon’s protest. “Nah. You would. But there was something else too. Kind of like getting off. Like an orgasm, when you thought you smoked one.”

That last bit was embarrassing. But how do you express it? That war is hell, but at its height it’s also life. Life multiplied by some number no one’s heard of yet.

“Mostly though, we shot farm animals: pigs, chicken, oxen…”

“Why?” Simon asked.

“Some villages were suspected of supporting the enemy,” I answered. “Hell, the only reason I carried that zippo was to burn hooches. I didn’t even smoke.”

Fragile, ancient things them villages. We’d decimate even the big ones in an afternoon without hardly putting our minds to it. The whole company—a hundred plus grunts—watching flames take shape on thatched roofs in the midday sun. My nineteen year old mind figuring that surely this many people wouldn’t expel this much effort on something wrong, would they? Then the sergeants would form us up and we’d drag ass on. Flamethrower heat from them smoldering huts at our backs, women’s screams ringing in our ears, usually without a single V.C. in tow, and me so God damned tired that as far as judgment went I might as well have been piss-drunk.

The disgust on the boys’ faces jarred me back to the basement.

“What do you mean, ‘when you thought you smoked one?’ ” Gabriel asked.

“You could never really be sure,” I nodded at Gabe’s tone, enraged as he was at the injustice of it all. I hope that boy never loses the capacity for that sorta rage, and I wish to God I had had the guts to tell him that right then and there.

What I did do was place my hand on Gabe’s knee and say, “It’s ok, son.”

I didn’t know shit from apple gravy when I first showed up. Under ambush, I aped what the other dudes in my platoon were doing and sent rounds down range. Looking back, I’m pretty sure something would have shifted inside me if I’d actually killed someone. I would’ve known. But I didn’t tell the boys that. I didn’t wanna cop outta what I might’ve done.

“My first squad leader was a lot like you, Simon. Dawkins. Terrell Dawkins. Tough motherfucker. All gas, no brakes. Always volunteering to walk point. When I first met him I thought he was nuts.”

I tried to describe Dawk during that first meeting, him sitting on a rock, staring into the bush, and flipping the selector switch on his weapon back and forth between semi and full. In a cadre of touched men Dawk’s mania stood out, making him the platoon superstar.

“Terrell’s theory was the second man was more likely to get hit than the first. Dawk was the kind of guy who didn’t get medals, just that deep field respect that mattered more.” I stopped short, reminding myself: no bullshit. “He was a good killer. One of our best.”

“God smiles on idiots and drunks,” Michael said.

“Fortune favors the bold.” Simon didn’t smile, but I could tell he wanted to.

“I don’t know about all that.” Them two knuckleheads were constantly tossing quotes back and forth at each other. “In war you learn more about cowardice than courage. That and luck.”

All them crazy superstitious rituals to fool yourself into believing that it wasn’t just random. Always volunteering for point, only smoking on every second break, never walking in tank tracks. All desperate bids to convince yourself that getting smoked depended on more than just ending up fifth in line on patrol, or where you took a shit, or when you noticed that your bootlaces were untied. Charlie was greasing three hundred G.I.s a month in ’71 and every one of them had come up with a whole laundry list of reasons why it wouldn’t be him filling that flag-draped metal coffin. It just so happened that Terrell’s crazy superstitious rituals gave that motherfucker the confidence to stalk the jungle like a God damned immortal. Boys like Terrell—and Simon—don’t need much convincing of their immortality. In my experience, that type fears cowardice more than anything that might actually kill them.

On some level we all must ‘a known that it was just dumb luck that kept us from getting hit when Terrell was on point. But the fact remained: the men of 3rd Platoon-Bravo Company-1st Calvary Division didn’t get hit when Terrell walked point. Never. Not once. Even on patrols a good ten, fifteen miles into Cambodia—the heart of Indian country—so far out that we was resupplied by mermite cans kicked out the side of a Huey.

“Terrell was already in his second tour when I showed up in the summer of ‘71. He had something to prove. Usually that made guys dangerous. But not Terrell. I think deep down Terrell wanted to challenge all the things whites had been telling him his whole life. After he made staff sergeant, he bucked for a third tour. When my year in country was up I rotated back to the States and spent the rest of my enlistment at Ft. Carson handing out basketballs at the base gym.”

I licked my lips. I wished I had brought a taste of liquor down to the basement with me. Sunday morning be damned.

“Terrell and me used to talk a lot about Black Nationalism. How the war in Vietnam was going to change everything for the black man in the United States. He once asked me what niggers had done when they returned from America’s other wars.” The boys winced. I guess that word grated outta my mouth, but not Tupac’s. I ploughed ahead. “They’d kept on being niggers. But this time it was gonna be different.”

When I was seventeen, almost everyone I knew was black. Lieutenant Nic Voivodeanu, the 3rd platoon commander, had been my first white friend. Well, as much as a 2nd Lieutenant could be a Private First Class’s friend anyway.

One time in the mess hall in An Khe, Nic spotted me in the middle of scratching out a letter home.

“Who’re you writing to, Mathis?” Nic asked.

“My mom, sir.”

I returned to my letter, but felt the LT still standing there, examining the top of my head.

“Sir?” I asked, looking up.

“How old are you, Mathis?”

“Nineteen, sir.”

Nic grinned. “I bet your parents are proud.”

I didn’t say how, before leaving for boot camp, my mom made a point of telling me about the battered, castrated body of a black WWII veteran, swinging from a yellow poplar in her neighborhood back in Tennessee.

“They’d stripped off his uniform before stringing him up,” my mom had told me.

Nah, I didn’t tell my West Point educated lieutenant that. Instead I nodded and returned the LT’s smile.

Nic couldn’t understand the rage of the flip-flopped men tracking our platoon in the bush, still less those flip-flopped men’s perfect comprehension of us black draftees marching for an empire that didn’t want us. The same way even a CO like Measmer couldn’t see himself pulling a shank on a hack like Nestor. They saw gooks and cons, where I saw—see—men with identities shaped around survival. Men like me, only more desperate and maybe, just maybe, more brave.

“We arrived to Vietnam as just two more boys without the juice to get out of that selective service letter.” I knifed a hand in Michael’s direction, unintentionally giving the boy a jump. “Conscripts. But we became volunteers. Every single one of us over there was really a volunteer. I guess I’m still trying to figure out how to feel about that.”

That last bit I said more to myself than to the boys.

“The lieutenant wrote to me at Ft. Carson when Terrell finally caught one.” I ain’t sure how long it took to medevac Terrell back to the division hospital in An Khe, after he stepped on that manure tinged punji stick. I do know the wound went gangrenous. Terrell was dead in a week. Staff Sergeants didn’t walk point. Maybe Terrell had been the number two man when the contaminated wood pierced his boot. Nic didn’t say.

I wasn’t close to all the guys our platoon lost in Vietnam. I watched in silence as PFC Danny Hames gurgled pink froth waiting for a dust-off, Doc Reynolds fighting those obscene, animal bits leaking from the hillbilly’s punctured body. Exactly a week after Nic ordered Hames to remove the Confederate flag he’d draped over his bunk. Nah, I hadn’t felt sorrow while Hames lay there, making the sound of a baby working up for a good scream. Distress and disgust, yeah. Same as I’d felt when they’d carted Sgt. Kearns’s psychotic, murdering ass out of the mess tent. But not sorrow.

But here’s the thing. Losing so many contemporaries—boys like Dawk, Hames and Kearns, boys with similar hopes, fears, and families—so early in life wears on your soul in a way that I couldn’t articulate to them boys. Hell. How do you articulate any of it? Growing old in an afternoon? The whore you were tighter with than most of the men covering your six? The fantastic beauty of muzzles flashes at night? Friendships cleansed of all those things that seem so important back in the world?

Instead I maintained an eye contact with Simon that the teenager—as tough as that boy was—just couldn’t bear.

“The things that defined my service won’t define yours.” My gaze settled onto my clasped hands in surrender. “Kids join the military for a lot of different reasons, Sy. Make sure you’re doing it for the right ones.”

A week later, Simon attended his father’s funeral in New Orleans. Two weeks after that I drove him to the recruiter’s office. He never mentioned his father’s funeral. Still hasn’t.

Simon signed a delayed entry contract guaranteeing him a shot at the Special Forces Medic ‘pipeline.’ Everything he wanted.

The boys graduated in the spring of ‘98 and had one last summer together. In the autumn Michael packed for Columbia University, Simon for Fort Bragg.

***

The governor granted Riggs’s parole on July 14th 2004, a Wednesday. Measmer, looking sharp and confident with supervisor’s pips shining on his collar, walked Riggs downstairs. I watched Measmer and Riggs trading jokes as they passed through the sally-port to the staff side. Measmer handed me the manila folder that contained Riggs’s file.

I signed the pink release slip paper-clipped to the front of the folder. Then I shook Riggs’s hand. In my twenty-seven years at Antoine this was the third time I personally met a prisoner for release.

Riggs smiled, eyes wide and moist at the edges. “Now for the hard part.”

I found Simon sitting in my living room with Clare and Gabriel that evening.

Simon, in ramrod straight civvies, popped to his feet. “Look at you, old man.”

I grabbed him and held him way too long in a vain attempt to chokehold the restlessness still pulsating from his body. Be still now, son. Now is the time to be still.

Simon told safe, prepackaged, war-stories. The constipation he suffered from weeks of eating nothing but MREs, the Afghan ‘terp whose English was flawless until he cussed (bastard son of cocksucking motherfuck! Yes! You, my friend!), the exhibitionist sergeant with the penchant for walking on his hands in the nude.

“What was his name?” Gabriel asked.

“Who?” Simon said.

“The nudist sergeant.”

“Appenzeller.” Simon’s smooth ebony face dropped to the empty coffee cup in his hands. Then he met my eyes. “Justin. Sergeant Justin Appenzeller. All gas, no brakes, that guy.”

I heard things that my wife and son didn’t. Things both Simon and I were glad the other understood, but that we wouldn’t say aloud; as if we had an unspoken pact not to sully the language of peace with descriptions of war.

“He smiles more,” Clare said, clearing the coffee cups in the living room after the boys left.

I hugged my wife from behind.

Clare reached over her shoulder with her free hand and pulled my cheek close to hers.

“He does smile more,” I whispered.

You made it, son. Now comes the hard part.

***

While in the United States Marine Corps, Dewaine served in Syria, Jordan, and Ukraine. Besides his stint in the military, Dewaine spent most of his professional life working for the United Nations Department of Safety and Security, with assignments in the North Caucasus, Kenya, Somalia, and Occupied Palestine. He is now based in the Philippines as the Field Security Adviser for the Asian Development Bank.

The RPG cage rattled as the Stryker barreled down the doubletrack road. The patrol leader, Sergeant First Class Burns, stood in the commander’s hatch with tight fists and his checkered scarf up to his eyes. Burns told himself to be cool. Inside he was flapping like a hooked trout. Tonight, their target was a safehouse for a Sunni militia captain. This was a mission no one wanted, for there was a sandstorm brewing in the eastern desert. If caught in the blinding sand, Burns’ men would be cutoff from air cover and medevac. The platoon would beat the storm if shit didn’t go sideways. Be cool, Burns told himself again.

They snaked through the stinking streets of Al-Hayy. As they navigated the roundabouts, Burns issued commands to the driver. “In at the six, out at the twelve.” Then, “In at the six, out at the three.” Checking over his shoulder, Burns saw the four Strykers in tail holding their intervals. On they went. Burns was calm, at least on the outside

A half hour into the drive, they crossed a median south of Al-Hayy. Exposed rebar in the median flattened two tires on the second Stryker. They halted for a tire change. Burns said, “Shit has gone sideways.”

The radio beeped, “2-7, this is 2-2. Blue Force Tracker shows an engineer convoy two clicks west. They’ve probably got a power-jack. Let’s get ‘em on the horn.”

Burns answered, “I ain’t asking pot-bellied engineers for help.” As a matter of principle, Burns didn’t ask others for help. It was poor form in the infantry.

A red-faced corporal from first squad fumbled with the hydraulic jack in the dark. Burns snatched the jack and set it himself. He then threw in a twist of tobacco and wrenched off the lug nuts. The corporal was standing there looking dumb so Burns told him, “Grab Alpha Team and get me two fuckin’ tires, like yesterday,” and the corporal was running before Burns finished the sentence. Four sweaty men set the new tires and the platoon was moving again, a half hour behind schedule.

Once more, Burns stood tall in the TC hatch, his body exposed above the waist, as if he’d already forgotten about the two IEDs the night before. The Strykers topped out at 55 mph, their pistons pumping inside turbocharged engines. The sweet scent of diesel combustion vanished in the wind. There was only the clean smell of the desert. Burns loved that smell.

The squad in back of Burns’ Stryker were all standing half out the hatches, sweeping their guns and lasers across the palms and blackrock desert. Sergeant Garcia stood closest to the ramp, silenced MP5 pulled into his shoulder. He was slaying dogs for no particular reason. “Did you see that shot?” said Garcia, lasering the dog he had just dropped, “On the move at 50 meters. It’s hard being this good.”

The badlands in the east were sun-cracked. Sand dunes marked the horizon where the storm would come from. About 0345, the platoon pulled up short of an unnamed village and scanned with thermals. Burns spied what looked to be a colony of sand castles ringed by a palm grove. Inside the village, lampposts and courtyard floods cast hoops of dim light, but no one stirred.

Burns told the driver, “Shoot the gap, there—don’t slow down,” and they were off again. Reaching the village, they rumbled through the main thoroughfare without tapping the brakes. Burns saw electric lines ahead. The twisting network of lines were strung up between the houses, running up and down and crisscrossing the road. Some ran lengthwise to a rookery of huts that must have been the village bazaar. This tangled web was the power grid, the arteries and veins of a clay village that seemed a biological extension of the desert.

The squad boys in the back hatches ducked to avoid being clotheslined. Burns’ Stryker turret ripped down the first few lines, which twisted and knotted over the hull. There were flashes and sparks and cracks of electricity as more lines snapped off and whipped about. On they went, bringing down more lines. What the turret missed, the Stryker’s antennae did not, and by the far end of the village, a few dozen electric lines were wrapped around Burns’ Stryker, some dragging behind it, some still glowing with current. Burns rose in the hatch, saying, “Everyone up,” through the intercom. The squad boys in back emerged like gophers and aimed once more at the desert. Behind them, the village was now dark. The platoon crossed into palm groves, and three miles on, they halted at the rally point.

They circled the Strykers, dismounted, and hustled into a screen of grasses and reeds. A half mile later, they blew in the target house’s metal door with a water charge. A man with bed-head and a Kalashnikov came running down the stairs to see about the fuss. Burns shot him in the face and his head exploded like a water balloon across a tiled wall where a family picture hung. Burns kicked away the gun and stepped over the body. The assault squads fanned through the rooms. They cleared the house in one long minute, but their man was nowhere to be found. They tossed the rooms. Garcia smashed dinner plates on the kitchen floor where two old women sat wailing. They left the women on the floor and exited the house.

Burns marched for the Strykers as dawn reared up brown in the east. In came the first grains of the storm. Burns blinked sand from his eyes, and radioed Garcia, “Storm’s a’coming.” First squad emerged from the house carrying plastic bags with confiscated cell phones and thumb drives and digital paraphernalia. They trotted for the Strykers, once more crossing the palm grove, following the same swath they had trampled during their silent infil. Burns waved at them to hurry.

Garcia skittered through the grass and came up panting, telling Burns, “Thought you might try to leave us.” Just then, Garcia yelped and jumped and ran wildly ahead. He only made it twenty feet before he dropped. Garcia rolled, calling out, “Something bit me, something bit me.” There was panic in his voice. It all happened in a blink.

Turning on his rifle-mounted flashlight, Burns scanned the grass. There he saw a cobra with shiny skin and vertical pupils. When it hissed, the venom on its fangs glistened in the flashlight beam. The cobra had the girth of a man’s forearm. Its tail rested somewhere unseen in the chest-high grass. Taking a bead, Burns fired twice. The second bullet split the head, which slumped onto the twitching body. Burns ran back to Garcia, and found the squad boys huddled around him. Elbowing through the crowd, Burns saw that Garcia’ leg was swelling badly, the skin cherry-colored. Doc kneeled over Garcia and produced a set of surgical scissors and cut off Garcia’s boot.

Doc looked up at Burns, “This is bad. What bit him?”

Burns said, “A cobra. Where’s the anti-venom.”

With edge in his voice, Doc said, “Fucking anti-venom? Sarge, what you think this is?”

“You don’t have any?”

Garcia broke in with groans and then a mortal scream. He thrashed and pedaled in a circle, flattening a little landing in the grass.

Doc held him still and told Burns, “Anti-venom?! I fix holes. I ain’t no snake doctor.”

Burns said, “We’ve got no air support. It’s an hour and twenty back to the COP. How long’s he got?”

“A cobra bite? Shit, uh.” Doc rose and whispered to Burns, “He’ll be dead by the time we get back. We need a bird.”

Burns said, “They’ll never fly in this storm.”

“Maybe we ask the village north of here.”

“The one we just came through?”

Doc shrugged his shoulders. “Or we could go back to the target. I’m sure those old hags in the kitchen would be happy to help.”

“Goddammit,” said Burns. He dreaded the idea of asking for help, especially since the platoon had just destroyed the village grid.

Doc said, “What choice do we have?”

Burns scratched his chin for a bit, and said, “Mount up.”

They pulled up in the village at 0700. The first squall of sand was ripping through the houses. Bits of trash skipped through the alleys. The palms dotting the dirt streets shook violently against the storm’s power. They had only a few minutes before the storm descended fully upon them. At this point, thought Burns, a bird was out of the question and it would be a long, slow drive back to the outpost. The options were cruel. Up ahead, a group of bearded old men were marching down the street, coming right for the Strykers. Pulling his scarf up against the stinging grains, Burns jumped from the hatch and strode toward the men. Burns guessed they were the village elders. One leather-faced old man stomped forward and met Burns. In his right hand the old man held a coil of black wire.

The old man held up the wire. There was anger in his tired eyes. “You did this.”

Burns opened his mouth to lie about it. He realized the same black lines were still draped across his Stryker. “We didn’t see them in the dark.”

“You rip down the lines and we put them back up and you rip them down again,” said the old man. “This is not good for my boy. He needs a machine to breath. He suffers when you kill the power.”

Burns said, “I’m sorry for your son.” Burns squirmed in his body armor. He didn’t want to say what he was about to. “We need your help.”

“Help?”

“Yes. A cobra bit one of our men.”

“Why should I help men who take away our power?”

“We are new here. The soldiers you speak of are gone, back to the States.” Burns was telling the truth. “Now we are here and things will be different.” Burns wasn’t sure that part was true.

The old man looked at the wall of sand in the east.

Burns tugged his shoulder. “Chief, can you help us?”

The old man said, “You, the Ameriki, ask the help of my tribe.”

“Our man doesn’t have much time.”

“What of your helicopters?” asked the old man, “What of your planes?”

“The storm keeps them on the ground.”

The old man smirked. “You ask me.” He didn’t seem to believe what he was hearing. “We’ll help on one condition. Promise me this — from now on, you’ll go around our village. You’ll not spoil our electric scheme.”

Burns put his hand over his heart. “I swear, Chief, as long as I’m here, no one will interfere with your electric lines.”

Leather-face went back to the elders and they exchanged clipped words. They began shouting at each other and the chief and the Americans. At last, the elders summoned a boy on a rooftop, who ran down the street and disappeared. Minutes later, the boy returned holding an old woman by the elbow. The old woman wore a black cloak over her curved back. She carried a jar filled with jade-colored paste. Alpha team searched her and then dropped the ramp on the Stryker, revealing Garcia lying on a stretcher in the cabin. Garcia’s leg was turning green. His face was ghostly white and glazed with sweat. The woman hobbled up the Stryker ramp with her cloak wheeling in the wind. She sat on her heels and went to work with her paste.

Watching all this, Burns stood beside the old man and the boy.

The old man rubbed his white beard and told Burns, “The boy who brought this woman, once, he was bitten when out with the goats. We used the paste on him. It attacks the venom.”

The young boy must have heard the tale being recalled, for he hiked up one leg of his track pants. There was a brown scar at midcalf. It looked as if the skin there had been removed with an ice cream scoop. The boy fingered the scar and then held his chin high, looking very proud of himself.

Burns told the boy, “You’re a brave boy. Braver than me.” Then Burns put a hand over his own heart again and addressed the old man. “Thanks, Chief. I’m grateful, and know this – I keep my word.”

The old man said, “You must get your man to a doctor quickly or he’ll lose the leg. He will be well, Inshallah.”

“As soon as she’s done,” said Burns, “We’ll move on.”

“Remember our village, remember our electric scheme.” Pointing east, the old man said, “There is a track through the grove, it’s good driving, clear and wide. If you come back again, use it to go around. We’ll mend the potholes just for you.”

“If we hear of bad men in the village,” said Burns, “We must come in.”

“So be it,” said the old man, “But you’ll find no evil men here. Maybe on the farms, but not in the village. Nothing escapes my eye.”

“I promise we’ll go around,” said Burns, “You’re a good man, Chief. You’re on our team. We take care of our team. Rebuild your power lines. No more harm will come to them. You’re under our care now.”

The old man said, “Thank you.” He closed his eyes for a moment against the sand, which now came in slants. “It’s my boy I think of.”

About that time, the old woman finished with Garcia and capped her jar and disappeared in the blowing sand. The platoon mounted again and set off with Garcia moaning over his leg. Burns waved goodbye to the chief. They rounded a bend and rolled on into blowing sand.

A week later, Burns swung open the door of the plywood hut they called HQ. He picked up the red phone and listened to the report on Garcia. The old woman’s paste had done well. The main ingredient came from a plant called paniculata, long used by the natives as an anti-venom. Garcia would keep his leg. He’d be back after two weeks of R&R.

That afternoon, some boys from JSOC rolled into their outpost in armored jeeps. Burns had his feet up on the desk in HQ, listening to the battalion radio update when a long-haired Operator came into HQ. A tiger-striped rifle was slung across his chest. He moseyed up to Burns, saying his name was Nick. Nick wanted to know about routes to the north. He unfolded a map on the desk in front of Burns. Nick said they had just crossed through the southern part of Burns’ battlespace.

“Down south,” said Nick, “There was this little village that had no name on the map.” Nick pointed to the village on the map.

Burns gulped when he saw it was the chief’s village.

Nick went on, “About 0800, we drove through. We must of clipped 200 powerlines. Half are still hanging off my jeep. This leather-faced old man was throwing rocks at us. One broke my windshield. No shit, that old man threw a rock through a bulletproof windshield.” Nick laughed so hard his shoulders trembled. “That old bastard was pissed. I wouldn’t go down there for a while.” Nick was still laughing about it when he left.

Burns puffed his cheeks as he blew out a long, frustrated breath. He picked up the red phone for Battalion. When the supply officer announced himself on the line, Burns asked if anyone had any goddamn powerline poles.

***

Ray McPadden served in the infantry with 10th Mountain Division and 2nd Ranger Battalion. He deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan. He was awarded the Purple Heart, two Bronze Stars, and a medal for valor from his time in combat. He holds a master’s degree from the University of Oregon. His works of short fiction have been published with Military Experience and the Arts. Ray now lives in Colorado with his wife and daughter.